Page 118 of Shifters Reckoning

“We have a real date later.”

She side-eyed me as we moved down the steps. “Oh? Is that so?”

“I’m your date for the end of the world.” Only one allowed to touch you. Mine.

Her mouth turned down, and her shoulder dropped by an inch. “You’re the only one I’ll ever take to the end of the world, love. Maybe we can plan on catching a movie next week?”

“I swear, someday we’ll be free of the doom,” I whispered. Images of tearing Acheron limb from limb splattered through my head, but the imagined carnage did little to cheer my mate. Fuck. I’ll be glad to get rid of Acheron.

Me, too. ’Til death do us part, Logan Blackwood.

I didn’t miss the shiver that rolled through her, but pointing it out to her would have been worse. Instead, we strolled across the lawn without speaking.

We’d called Ville Platte and a mixture of other shifters into the training gym in the last few hours before moonrise. It was going to be a quick and dirty delve, just enough to appease the naysayers.

Della settled Marcus on his back on the mats. “Comfortable?” she asked.

“Thank you.” He pressed his palms to the ground.

I jogged to the relic trove and retrieved the linking stone. After I returned, I placed it near Marcus, and Emma took her seat.

At the edge of the training floor, Torbin steepled his fingers, inhaled, and exhaled. Then he took his place at Marcus’s head. Torbin leaned over the cat alpha and pressed his hands to Marcus’s temples.

Wordlessly, the selected jury of twelve shifters stepped forward. Della, three more of the Ville Platte cats who’d led the raid, Flynn for the foxes, Torbin as the delver, and six others.

“Everyone ready?” Emma asked.

“Yes, Multimorph,” they echoed.

“Here we go,” she said, reaching over and lacing her fingers through mine. My mate channeled her magic into the relic. Besides, there would have been no keeping her out of the proceedings even hours before she fought Acheron.

I grounded her the way we’d practiced, so the relic’s draw ran through me rather than using up the reserves she would need tonight.

She flared. I held.

Tendrils of magic flowed from her to the linking relic, into Torbin, into the jury, and back into her. Soon, we shared each other’s minds, and rainbow energy circled us all.

The relic connected the witnesses to Torbin’s mind.

A breeze blew through the gym as the linking relic changed from stone to crystal. All their eyes glowed in multicolor swirls. Mine did, too, if I had to guess. There were fifteen of us tied up in each other’s brains now.

“We’re linked, Torbin,” Emma announced. “Please begin.”

At that, the hulking bear located the bond Marcus’s sister had burned into the big cat’s brain. Torbin pulled her lucid self into the light of our minds, and she testified on her own behalf. As she did, Marcus lip-synced along with her words. Creepy as hell, maybe, but she showed us everything.

Not in words only. More in the way the skill of delving shows memory laid over memory. We experienced the day Acheron realized she had birthed the multimorph, the day he took her, the day at the creek, the moment she reached into her own brother’s mind, not to hurt him but because it was the only connection she had left. She clawed her way into his thoughts to leave something behind, anything, a gap she could whisper through later.

We understood the cost. The link had slowly burned Marcus’s sight away to nothing, and she had felt every second as it had happened to him. She would have carved out her own eyes twice over if the magic had let her trade places with him.

Their anguished screams mirrored one another, and I gritted my teeth against the agony. Then came everything after—the mis-tied knots, the crossing stroke smudged a half inch out of true while a clearing filled with mages never looked up, the maps she slipped into Marcus’s head one careful piece at a time, the warding she loosened, the birthing-lines she guttered, the seam she whispered about over and over until her own brother’s skull rang with it.

And under all of it, the reason.

A boy.

Eli, her son, kept alive, still breathing because she complied, and every act of sabotage was a coin flipped against her own child’s life, paid out of her own splitting mind, with no one to tell and no way to prove she was anything but the monster’s compass.

Every betrayal in the war unspooled backward in our minds, and every single one of them was a shifter fighting the enemy from the inside.